COMIC CLOTHIER
CALGARIAN BEHIND THOR’S WARDROBE
When it comes to researching what people wear, some jobs are more clear-cut than others for movie costume designers.
Which is not to say it is ever easy. But if you are working on Paul Gross’s Alberta-shot Passchendaele, for instance, information on the First World War isn’t that hard to find.
Designing for the post Civil-War setting of the AMC western Hell on Wheels? There’s plenty of books about the period. But what do you do when coming up with an original look for a mega-budget sequel about Marvel superhero Thor and other characters who reside in the fictional realm of Asgard? Well, you improvise. “Even for a fantasy show, there’s usually an X amount of research involved,” says Calgary-based costume designer Wendy Partridge, who worked on all three projects. “Even for Thor — which is fantasy, makebelieve, creating worlds that don’t exist — for me anyway, there always tends to be something based on reality. Thor is a really good example. I went back thousands of years in Celtic and Norse history because the mythology of Thor is based in that Norse mythology. So you bring a conscious design reality to Asgard. I went to great lengths to bring ancient — anywhere from 600 B.C. to zero — artwork for the design base for Thor.”
So Partridge spent a lot of time at both the British and Victoria and Albert museums, studying ancient design, history and the intricacies of La Tene art. She also read comic books ... lots and lots of comic books.
“Marvel has great archives,” says Partridge with a laugh. “So, my God, I went through enough comics for a lifetime.”
Thor: The Dark World opens on Friday, one of the most hotly anticipated and heavily hyped of entries into the holiday blockbuster season.
Partridge is not new to big movies, of course. The British-born costume de- signer worked on Hellboy, Conan the Barbarian, Silent Hill, Blade II and Underworld. But when it comes to Hollywood franchises, Thor’s latest adventure may be as big as it gets.
Partridge spent a year in England working on the film, which required her to create 1,500 costumes for actors such as Chris Hemsworth, Anthony Hopkins and Rene Russo. She had a staff of 120 people and a budget of nearly $10 million. There were 30 to 40 versions of Thor’s cape alone. Partridge was on hand for all costume fittings, working with all the major actors. She had to make the women look sexy and men look bold and menacing. More specifically, she had to find innovative ways to make the armour-heavy costumes functional for the film’s many action sequences.
“I think we had three in-house armour departments and five out-sourced armour companies,” Par- tridge says. “That’s all very intricate and it all takes a lot of work and a lot of rework, especially for the mobility in an action movie. It’s always a double-edged sword. There’s always a compromise between wanting to look good and wanting to move well. I think it’s one of the things I’ve done really well during my career. I have a bit of a reputation to be able to pull off both of those elements. I think that may have been why I got the job in the first place. My technical knowledge is pretty sound.”
Partridge did everything under the scrutiny of head brass from Marvel Studios, exacting bosses who approved costume designs with an eye to an extensive after-market for toys and merchandise. And, as with most blockbusters these days, everything had to happen under a murky veil of secrecy.
“You give away your first-born,” jokes Partridge. “No, but they are very, very big on that.
“Usually I would get a script before I would go into an interview so you have some idea of what you are interviewing for. Not with Thor. In fact, there wasn’t a script for quite awhile. They were developing a script as they were doing pre-production. So that was unusual. But there was so much to design. It wasn’t like I needed every page of the script to get my job done. We knew the basics. We knew the characters and more-orless what situations they would be in and what we needed to produce for them to wear, for the first few weeks.”
Thor is just one of the highlights for Partridge in the past few years. She went from that production straight to Pompeii, a Toronto-shot historical epic and love story set amid the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
For the inaugural Canadian Screen Awards in March, she received three nominations in costume design. Two were in the film category — Resident Evil: Retribution and Silent Hill: Revelation 3-D — and one for the Alberta-shot television western Hannah’s Law.
Although she did attend the Los Angeles première of Thor earlier this week, Partridge says she hopes to take a year off and stay home in Calgary, where she first moved to work on costume design for the opening ceremonies of the 1988 Winter Olympics. She has been away from her family for two and a half years, moving from the Toronto productions of Silent Hill: Revelation 3-D, to Resident Evil: Retribution, to a year on Thor in England and then back to Toronto for Pompeii.
And while she doesn’t like to pigeonhole herself, Partridge admits that she prefers fantasy worlds or historic epics to contemporary films, although she has done all of the above over a career that has spanned 40 years.
Partridge opened her first dressmaking business in England when she was 14. She eventually arrived in Edmonton in the early 1970s, where she began doing costume design work for the local theatre and eventually graduated to some CBC shows. She signed on to work with a young David Cronenberg for 1979’s Fast Company in Edmonton and the rest is history.
Since then, Partridge has worked on every sort of film or TV series imaginable, both indie and mainstream and in multiple genres. For instance, she was a costume designer for the pocketchange budgeted, Alberta-shot Western A Legend of Whitey, which probably could have been made 10 times over using Partridge’s costume budget for Thor alone.
“You are always trying to put your best foot forward,” says Partridge. “So it doesn’t matter if it’s a $5,000 costume budget or a $10-million costume budget. The pressure is kind of the same. The expectations are the same.”